Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computers, and more particularly, to data compression using compression blocks and partitions in a computing environment.
Description of the Related Art
In today's society, computer systems are commonplace. Computer systems may be found in the workplace, at home, or at school. Computer systems may include data storage systems, or disk storage systems, to process and store data. Data storage systems, or disk storage systems, are utilized to process and store data. A storage system may include one or more disk drives. These data processing systems typically require a large amount of data storage. Customer data, or data generated by users within the data processing system, occupies a great portion of this data storage. Many of these computer systems include virtual storage components. Data compression is widely used to reduce the amount of data required to process, transmit, or store a given quantity of information. Data compression is the coding of data to minimize its representation. Compression can be used, for example, to reduce the storage requirements for files, to increase the communication rate over a channel, or to reduce redundancy prior to encryption for greater security. However, data compression consumes a significant amount of computing (e.g. central processing unit “CPU”) resources. Also, data can be lost due to problems such as system crashes, hardware failures, and abnormal computing system halts. Journaled file systems can be used to maintain data integrity when these types of problems occur.